The honest account

These five pieces exist because almost everything written about Celtic salt is written to sell it. Two of them are plain provenance — where the salt comes from and how it is made — and they are more interesting than the marketing, because the grey colour, the dampness and the irregular crystal all come out of the same method.

The comparison piece is where the category gets uncomfortable. The widely repeated claim that unrefined salts carry dozens of beneficial trace minerals traces back to a single popular book from 2003 about a different salt, most of its figures sat below the detection limit, and a couple of the elements listed do not occur naturally at all. The minerals in Celtic salt are real. At the amount a person sensibly eats they are nutritionally trivial, and we would rather say so than repeat a number we cannot stand behind.

The iodine piece is the one we would ask you to read even if you buy nothing. Swapping iodised table salt for an unrefined one removes an iodine source that Australia added deliberately, and if you also eat little bread you may have removed both of the main ones at once. That is a practical point about your diet, not a reason to avoid this salt.

No health claims anywhere on this site: Australian food standards do not permit them on a food this high in sodium, and they would not be true in any case.